


A Little Bit of Learning

by Zangofel



Series: Damn Stubborn Dreamer [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Cullen's POV, damn obvious exposition, the start of something new
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 20:50:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4760597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zangofel/pseuds/Zangofel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cullen doesn't know what to make of this new Elf woman. She's earnest, at least.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Bit of Learning

**Author's Note:**

> Tamsin has a story all her own, and it's grotesquely long. This is the earliest vignette, and it deserves to be included.

When Cullen first sees her, he can’t believe that the famed stranger who lived through the fade and closed tears in the sky is this little Dalish woman. She seems so slight, so frail, in her rogue’s leathers, surrounded by the thick beams and hard faces of Haven.

Their little base is cold, perpetually covered in snow and ice, but she never seems to shiver. Cullen wonders if she is used to cold and damp—he knows little about where the Lavellan clan roamed, in the Free Marches—but then, passing through the village, he spies her huddled next to the fire, hands curled around a mug of stew and shoulders wrapped in a blanket as she speaks quietly with the requisition officer. He feels a little bit better, then, though he didn’t know her implacability had been bothering him. She hates to show weakness, though; that much is clear to him. 

He had arrived in Haven quickly, and by the time she awakened and started getting her footing, he had established training schedules, drills, guard rotations. He falls easily back into routine, finding security in old patterns, and turns a critical eye on their small town, its defenses, its people. He speaks with Cassandra and Leliana, with Threnn and his requisitions officers, and they quietly begin bolstering defenses, repairing damaged walls and erecting new barricades. Anyone who’s willing to fight is recruited, even if he has to show them which end of a spear to hold. The Herald’s warriors are fierce in their own right, with their strengths, but the Herald herself… She is a rogue, and a good one. There’s no denying it. Cullen sees how smoothly she moves, how easily she holds her blades, how quiet her movement is. She sneaks up on him more than once, though he doesn’t think she does it on purpose; her soft leather boots make no noise on the trampled snow. 

But she’s not a warrior, despite her strengths. She’s a shadow, an arrow, trained to get in and out without being detected. She is not built to lead a fight, and doesn’t have the strength to sustain an entire battle. 

The first time the Herald and her warriors return to Haven from the Hinterlands, Cullen can see that Tamsin has realized this. She’s injured, bandages on her arm and side, an angry red line cutting a stark path down the side of her face. The soldiers training stop when she, Cassandra, Varric and Solas approach, gawking. Cullen barks at them, ordering them to attention, but he keeps an eye on the party as they pass. Varric, Cassandra and Solas just look tired, but Tamsin looks frustrated. Her grip on her knife hilts is white-knuckled, her jaw set. Cullen watches until they enter the gates, then returns his attention to his own business. 

When the evening bell in the chantry rings, Cullen dismisses the soldiers. They return weapons and shields to racks and shelves, and scatter, some to their tents, some to the chantry, some to the tavern. Cullen turns, as always, to survey Haven’s frozen landscape before heading in himself, and spies a slip of brown and grey vanishing around a bend in the road. 

Frowning, he heads down the road, keeping an eye on where he last saw that flash of movement. When he rounds the bend, the shape is a dark blur against a distant hillside. 

It doesn’t look threatening, but Cullen keeps an eye on it all the same, intending to watch until it vanishes over the hill—but it doesn’t. It stops halfway up the hillside and stays there, moving in tight patterns. Cullen can’t tell what it’s doing, exactly, or really what it is, but the movement looks familiar…

He stays where he is, watching. After a long while—near an hour, by his count—the light is too dim to make out anything but a flicker of shadows, and the form starts moving back towards Haven. Cullen straightens, one hand on his sword, and waits. 

As the shape nears, it condenses into Tamsin’s slight form. Her pale skin is blotched red from adrenaline and exertion, her hair plastered to her skin with sweat, and she’s shivering. 

“Herald?” Cullen asks, frowning. She looks up, startled, her hands tightening briefly on her daggers’ hilts, then scowls. 

“Commander,” she greets, her scowl disappearing behind a smile. “You’re out late.”

“As are you,” he replies. “Exacting revenge on some nugs?” He gestures to her blades. She shrugs. 

“We’ll go with that,” she says as she passes him, in a tone that is both cheerful and final. She smells of sweat, leather, and the spicy-sweet tang of healing potions. Her bandages are gone, but the line across her face remains, bright against her skin. 

“How was training?” Tamsin asks. Cullen falls into step beside her as they head back towards the village. 

“Satisfactory,” he replies. “We could use more resources, especially more iron, but there’s enough for the recruits we have. They’re an eager lot, if raw.”

“What they lack in skill, they make up for with enthusiasm?” Tamsin guesses. Cullen chuckles. 

“You could say that.”

“I’m sure you’ll make fine soldiers out of them yet, Commander.” Tamsin smiles at him, then turns and is up the rock wall and through a gap in the wooden barricade in one, two, three. It’s an odd habit, one that he assumes is particular to Dalish, as he hasn’t seen any other rogues do such an impressive imitation of a goat. Despite her speed, Cullen can see that her gait is heavy, her jumps a hair low. She’s more tired than she’s letting on, and he wonders what exactly happened in the Hinterlands. 

None of her companions volunteer information, however, and he doesn’t ask. 

Cullen sees Tamsin head up the hill to practice on her own almost every night over the next several weeks. Gradually, her quick grace hardens into something more sinuous and powerful, and he can see a corded strength growing in her. Every so often, he waits at the turn in the road until she comes down the hillside, and they walk back to the village together, talking about the soldiers, requisitions, camps in the Hinterlands, the new horses Horsemaster Dennet has brought to them. Tamsin walks with him through the front gate, those nights, instead of taking her shortcut up the rocks, and he appreciates the gesture. 

Eventually, she and her party come back with fewer wounds, and then none at all. They ride into the village sitting tall on their steeds, and while they always look tired, it becomes the weariness from a long journey, instead of from fighting too hard for victories that came too close to defeat. 

The cut on Tamsin’s face, from that first venture into the Hinterlands, never goes away. It stays stark and red for a long time, though it never becomes infected. Cullen passes her washing her face after getting back, once, and sees her take time to clean the cut carefully. She never applies a healing salve, though. It eventually heals over, turning from a sharp red to the pink of a new scar, and then a raised line of white that cuts through the branches tattooed on her cheeks. 

“Why?” Cullen asks, once, many weeks later. Tamsin looks at him, eyebrows raised in confusion. 

“Why what?” 

“Why leave that scar?” He asks, gesturing to her cheek. “Surely you could have healed it cleanly.”

“I could have,” she agrees, raising her fingertips to gently rub the scar, and is quiet. Cullen waits. 

They reach the gate to the village, and Tamsin pauses there instead of continuing on. Cullen turns to her; her expression is thoughtful. 

“Have you ever been at a point in your life where you realized that you’ve been doing everything wrong and could very easily get a lot of people very badly hurt?” she finally asks. 

A shiver flashes across Cullen’s skin, and he swallows, looking down briefly. “Yes,” he says, and hopes she can’t hear how rough his voice is. 

“I almost got Varric, Cassandra and Solas killed,” Tamsin says quietly. Cullen meets her gaze; she’s looking at him, though he can tell her mind is back on that trip to the Hinterlands, not here by the gate to Haven. “My clan sent me to the Temple because, back home, I’m one of our strongest fighters and hunters. But fighting bandits and slipping in and out of the shadows, or tracking down rams for dinner, is very different from leading a four-person charge into fields littered with mad Templars and terrified apostates. I slipped back into old habits. In and out of the shadows. I saw a bandit sneaking up behind Cassandra and panicked, tried to stop him, but Cassandra knew he was there. I got between them, and she had to pull back to keep from running me through. She stumbled into one of Solas’ spells, he redirected it into a tree, and the tree exploded. The sound told every templar and apostate within a mile where we were. 

“Templars thought they were running to kill mages, mages thought they were coming to keep templars from killing their own, then found us and didn’t know whose side we were on, so they attacked us.” She leans back against the village wall and looks up at the sky, at the Breach shining sickly green in the night. “Moving like a shadow doesn’t do jack when there’s no way to get behind an enemy without someone else spotting you. I barely managed to keep from getting killed. They carried that fight. They’re the reason there’s a pile of dead people in the woods and I’m not part of it.” She rubs her cheek. “I thought I was good enough. I was _very_ wrong. No one’s said anything, though. I think they know that I know what went wrong. But I didn’t let this heal away because I didn’t want to forget. Thinking I’m good enough will get me killed.”

She meets Cullen’s gaze. He knows he’s frowning. She looks curious, for a moment, then her face clears with understanding. “I don’t mean that I’m going to spend the rest of my short life beating myself up, Commander. I’m just not ever going to let myself think I’m fine, that I’m done training and working to be better. I can’t ever get complacent.”

Cullen considers this with a slow nod. It makes sense to him. She has her scar, he has his… well, his entire history. Never stop trying to atone for the mistakes you’ve made. Never think you’ve done enough. 

Cullen looks back at Tamsin. She’s smiling at him. “Thank you for listening.”

“Of course. I… I know what it’s like to be in that place. And what it’s like to want to fight your battles on your own, but if you ever want advice, or a training partner…”

“Thank you,” Tamsin says, and he can tell she means it. “But right now I need to eat, so I’m going to head to the tavern. Care to join me?”

Cullen returns her smile with one of his own. “Gladly,” he says.

 


End file.
